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Just weeks ago in San Antonio, at the first stop of our Battleground Texas listening tour, I met with a standing-room-only crowd of local volunteers to discuss our plans for changing politics in the Lone Star State.

With Congressman Joaquín Castro and Mayor Julián Castro beside me — and more than 300 passionate Texans all around us — the energy in the room was incredible. The diversity was inspiring.

Now, what once seemed like a fuzzy daydream is starting to become a reality.

Inspired by the passion we've seen from Texans who traveled to other states in both 2012 and 2008 to volunteer for President Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates, but consistently appealed to us to get to work in their home state, we launched Battleground Texas earlier this year. The basic goal is to turn Texas into a battleground by treating it like one.

That means registering new voters and connecting with Texans who are already registered but haven't been engaged in the democratic process.

It begins with the issues. For far too long, the Republican Party in Texas — like their counterparts nationally — have failed to represent the interests of young people, women, and minority communities. Time and again I've heard from these voters that their representatives in Austin and Washington, D.C., not only were out of step with their values on issues ranging from immigration to health care to education, they are pushing policies that hurt Texas.

In the starkest example to date, Rick Perry's politically motivated rejection of Medicaid assistance and refusal to set up the health-care marketplaces called for as part of the Affordable Care Act will deny 1.3 million Texans access to health insurance and cost Texans billions of dollars.

And then there are the demographics — and there have been plenty of analyses about the implications. In the past decade, census numbers show Texas became one of only four “majority-minority” states in the nation, and today fully 56 percent of Texans (more than 14 million people) identify as Latino, African-American, Asian-American or as a member of another minority community. Among those who are already registered to vote in these communities, there is also plenty of room for growth — for example, while 54.5 percent of Latino adult citizens in Texas were registered to vote in 2012, only about 39 percent actually turned out to vote. Similarly, only 63 percent of voting-age African-American residents in Texas cast their ballots in 2012.

The nonwhite vote is growing rapidly in Texas, with Democrats expected to gain a net 2 percentage points over the next eight years — even in the absence of any concerted action to engage these groups. Coupled with large numbers of young people and women in Texas who are regularly turning out in fewer numbers at the polls than their counterparts nationally, there is substantial potential for growth that should move the state from the reliably red status it has held since 1994 to one that better reflects the diversity and values of its changing population.

But it will take a grass-roots army to turn those historic shifts into political action. So Battleground Texas is taking the lessons learned from the work we did on the past two Obama campaigns — and building a team that will apply them to engaging Texans. Since we announced Battleground Texas just over two months ago, we have already hired a leadership team that unites campaign veterans from other battleground states with some of Texas' best and brightest political talent; held a 14-city “Listening Tour” that reached every region of Texas and were met with standing-room-only crowds in most locations; and deputized more than 1,000 volunteers who will register voters in their communities.

We've held focus groups in major cities and are working closely with a broad coalition of Texas organizations that share our belief that we can make Texas competitive again. At the same time, we're using people-focused, smart digital strategies to connect with Texans statewide — in fact, we surpassed the Texas Republican Party in Facebook “likes” in just 78 days.

We know it will take time — realistically it may be 10 years before Texas is reliably purple — and we fully expect to be running uphill.

And over the long term, it will take competitive candidates stepping up to tough races, too.

But the enthusiasm we've seen so far and what we've learned from grass-roots organizing in other former solidly red states such as Virginia give us real hope for what's to come. From the energy of the volunteers who inspired and now truly own this effort, to the welcome we've received from Democratic-elected leaders and the party, it's already been a remarkable beginning to this journey.

Wherever the fight leads us in the coming months and years, I will be hard-pressed to forget where we started and that first volunteer session. That room was our hope — and anything but a dream.